Chapter 366 - 357 — The Passage of Relics I

Chapter 366: Chapter 357 — The Passage of Relics I

The last forty seconds of Floor 37 were of no use to anybody and James watched them four times anyway.

Not the kill. The eleven minutes afterwards, where Cillian had walked the light round the base of that structure while James lay on the rock with his eye at an open channel.

He ran it at quarter speed with a line drawn on the screen and followed the red as far as the image would let him: south channel, north under the platform, gone. He did it for all four and got the same answer four times, which was that they went in and the recording did not show them coming out.

"It’s the same as Thursday," said Maeve, from the doorway.

"I know."

"You’ve watched it four times since Thursday."

"I’ve watched it *eleven* times since Thursday," said James, and closed it.

---

Three days, and it was mostly the armourer swearing at the front of James’s chest plate.

"Is it another boss?" said Finn, on the Friday morning, with his boots on the table.

"I don’t know."

"You must have a guess."

"I’ve got a guess and it’s worth nothing," said James. "We killed the man who ran that fortress and it changed exactly one thing, which is that he’s dead. The red’s doing what it was doing. Whatever’s next might have something standing in front of it and it might not."

"Then what are we going in for?"

"The route."

Maeve put her pen down. "Then that’s the first thing we establish. Where the exit is, what the floor actually wants and where the red goes. Before anybody hits anything."

"Agreed."

Finn looked at both of them and took his boots down. "You two are no fun since the wall."

---

James had a private version of it that he did not put in the briefing.

Every floor since twenty-eight, there had been a thing to kill and the killing had been the answer. Baldwin, the Warden, the Last Defender, the Steward — beat the thing in front of you and the floor gave you what it had.

And on Floor 37 he had beaten the thing in front of him, and the four channels under that platform had not so much as flickered.

So it was possible — not likely, just possible — that Team Zero would go up that mountain floor after floor killing whatever the Tower put in the doorway and arrive at the top having learned nothing at all, because the thing they were actually following did not care what they killed.

That did not make him want to fight less. It made him want to *look* more.

---

He opened the box on the way down the stairs and closed it again.

`[FREE STAT POINTS: 15]`

Fifteen now, which was most of three levels, and he was aware of exactly how that looked.

He had a reason and he had not said it out loud to anybody because it sounded like an excuse. Every time he had spent points, he had spent them on a problem he had already met — the duel, the manticore hide, holding a bind. The last four floors had not asked him for a stat. They had asked him for corpses he did not have, ground Fossor could not move through, and a mana bar with no floor under it.

*If the next one tells me what it wants, I’ll buy it.*

He put it away and went to get his coat.

---

`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY CONFIRMED]`

`[JAMES GANNER — FINN HALE — MAEVE CALLAHAN — RONAN CLEARY — CILLIAN WARD]`

`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — NOT TRANSFERRING]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST ACTIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`

`[FLOOR 38 ENTRY CONFIRMED]`

---

It was a room.

That was the first surprise, after two floors of caverns — a proper room, twenty metres by fifteen, with a flat ceiling four metres up and walls of dressed pale stone with no join lines James could find.

The way they had come in was behind them. Ahead, a wide doorway, eight metres across, opening onto something considerably larger.

Through it, James could see the beginning of a gallery: a long hall split down the middle by a spine of raised stonework, so that there was a route on the left and a route on the right and no way to see from one into the other. Both of them ran away toward a wall at the far end, a hundred and something metres off.

In that far wall was a door.

It was shut. It was four metres tall and made of the same pale stone as everything else, and there were marks cut into the face of it — a lot of them, in a grid, each about a hand across.

"That’s the exit," said Maeve.

"That’s the exit."

And running under the floor of the antechamber, in narrow cut channels two fingers wide, going out through the doorway and away down the gallery toward it: the red.

Four of them. Going the same direction Team Zero was going.

---

Against the left-hand wall of the antechamber was a pedestal.

It came up to hip height, plain, with a shallow cradle worked into the top of it, and lying in the cradle was an object.

James went and looked at it without touching it.

It was about a metre and a half long — a shaft of the same pale stone, slightly tapered, with a grip section in the middle where the surface had been cut into a chequer. One end was blunt and rounded. The other end held a socket, an open ring of stone about the width of a saucer, with nothing in it at all.

It had no edge, no point and no moving parts. It was, as far as James could tell, a stick with a hole in it.

"What is it?"

"No idea," said James.

`[FLOOR 38]`

`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STANDARD]`

`[MISSION TYPE: RELIC TRANSIT]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: CROSS THE GALLERIES AND REACH THE FAR EXIT]`

`[A COUNTDOWN WILL BEGIN WHEN THE RELIC IS LIFTED]`

"Right," said Finn, and started toward the pedestal.

"*Wait.*"

Maeve said it and Finn stopped, which he would not have done a year ago.

---

"Two minutes," she said. "Not planning. Looking."

They took four.

The gallery had two routes and a spine between them. Both routes had cover — pillars set at intervals on the outer side, and low walls where the floor stepped up. Neither route could see the other. Both of them converged at the far end in front of the door.

"There’s an open section in the middle down there," said Cillian, from the doorway with his neck craned. "Last twenty metres. The spine stops and it’s one room again in front of the door."

"Anything moving?"

"Nothing I can see, and I don’t like that either."

James gave the assignments and kept them short, because they were going to change.

"Finn and Cillian, left. Ronan and Maeve, right. I’ll take that—" he nodded at the pedestal, "—and stay in the middle where I can see both of you. If it turns out the thing’s useless I’ll put it down and come and be useful."

"And if it’s not useless?"

"Then I’ll tell you what it does when I know."

---

He put both hands on it and lifted it.

`[RELIC — THE LENS]`

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:04:30]`

The numbers came up across the middle of James’s vision and started falling, and the eight-metre doorway in front of them opened the rest of the way with a sound like a slab moving on sand, and the gallery filled up.

---

They came out from behind the pillars on both sides, and there were a lot of them.

Thin things, human-shaped and a head shorter, in nothing at all but a wrapping of grey cloth from the hips down, with skin the colour of the walls and no faces to speak of — a smooth front to the skull with a seam where a mouth should have been. They moved fast and low and they carried short stone blades.

`[GALLERY THRALL]`

`[LEVEL: 57]`

`[HP: 4,400 / 4,400]`

And at the far end of each route, standing still where the others ran, something much larger.

James got a look at the right-hand one, seventy metres away, because Ronan and Maeve were already going that way: three metres tall, heavily built, in a coat of overlapping plates that went to the floor, with a wide flat helm covering the whole head and no opening in it anywhere. It carried a stone maul in both hands and did not move.

`[GALLERY KEEPER]`

`[LEVEL: 62]`

`[HP: 21,000 / 21,000]`

"There’s one on ours as well," Finn shouted, from the left. "Same thing. Same spot."

Maeve, from the right: "They’re in *matching* positions. Same distance down each route."

"Then they’re both the lock," said James. "Kill both."

---

He went two strides after a Thrall and discovered the problem immediately.

He could not draw his sword.

The Lens was a metre and a half of stone and it needed both hands — one on the chequered grip and one further down the shaft — and the moment he let go with either one the whole thing swung and he nearly put the socket end into the floor.

He could not reach over his shoulder. He could not get a hand free to cast.

For about three seconds James Ganner stood in the middle of a gallery full of enemies holding a stick.

"*Right,*" he said, to nobody at all, and looked at the socket.

---

He found it by accident, which he was honest about afterwards.

He got the thing up in both hands the way you hold a spear you are not going to throw, and a Thrall came at him down the middle of the open floor, and James did the only thing available, which was to shove the socket end at it.

The ring lit.

Not brightly. A pale flat light came into the open circle of it and then went out of the far side in a line about as thick as a wrist, and it crossed the eleven metres between James and the Thrall in no time at all, and put a hole through the middle of it.

`[GALLERY THRALL — SLAIN]`

It kept going. The beam went another forty metres down the gallery and put a scorch on the far wall and then stopped when James’s hands relaxed on the grip.

"...*Oh*," said James.

"What happened?" said Maeve.

"It shoots."

"It *shoots?*"

"There’s a hole in the end and it shoots out of the hole." He turned it over once. "It’s a weapon. I can fight with this."

"Can you aim it?"

James pointed it at the next Thrall and found out.

`[GALLERY THRALL — SLAIN]`

"Reasonably," he said.

---

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:03:14]`

Finn and Cillian put the left-hand Keeper down at three minutes and fourteen seconds and it took them most of two minutes to do it.

It was not complicated and it was not quick — twenty-one thousand hit points in a coat of overlapping plate, in a corridor where it could not be flanked, with a maul that reached four metres. Cillian took the legs out from under it in the end and Finn did the rest at the join of the helm.

"*Left one’s down,*" Finn shouted. "And there’s — hang on. There’s writing."

"Writing?"

"Not writing. Marks. Three of them, in a line going up, where it was standing."

James was forty metres away in the central floor and could see them from there.

Three symbols, hanging in the air about two metres up, glowing a dull white in the mouth of the left-hand route: a **triple bar**, a **crescent**, and a **spiral**.

"I can see them from here," he called.

"I can see them from *here*," said Maeve, from the right-hand route, sixty metres away and across a stone spine. "They’re bright enough to read from the other side."

---

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:02:41]`

Ronan and Maeve took the right-hand Keeper eleven seconds later, and Ronan did it the way Ronan did everything, which was by standing in front of it until it ran out of ideas.

"Right one’s down."

"Symbols?" said James.

There was a pause.

"...Something’s there," said Maeve. "There’s a space. I can see a — it’s like looking at a window with the light behind it. There’s three of something in a column and I cannot read one of them."

"Come closer."

"I’m *four metres away*, James."

James left the central floor and went up the right-hand route at a jog with the Lens in both hands, and at twenty metres he stopped, because he could read them perfectly.

A **wedge**. A **spiral**. An **open eye**.

He looked away from them and they went out — not dim, *out*, replaced by exactly what Maeve had described, three blank bright spaces in the air.

He looked back through the socket ring, and there they were again.

"It’s the relic," he said. "You can’t read these without it. Maeve, you’re not going blind, they’re not there for you."

"Then why can I read the other ones?"

"I don’t know."

---

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:02:20]`

The far door did not open.

James had assumed it would. He had assumed it so completely that he stood there for four seconds waiting for it, and the seconds came off the counter while he did.

"It’s still shut," said Cillian.

"I can see that."

James went down the last of the gallery to the open floor in front of it, and the marks on the door resolved as he got closer. There were fifteen of them, in three rows of five, cut into the pale stone.

He recognised four straight away.

A triple bar. A crescent. A spiral. An open eye.

"They’re on the door," he said. "The ones from both sides. They’re all on the door."